Chapter XIII: Part 13

The English have been a beer-loving people for very many ages. It gives them their masculine, sturdy, truculent character. Beer and beef, it has been before remarked, make boys. Beer and beef won the battle of Waterloo. Beer and beef have built railways all over the world. Our troops in the Crimea languished, even on beef (it was but hard corned junk, to be sure) till the authorities sent them beer. There is a _lex non scripta_ among the labouring English, much more potent than many Acts of Parliament, and called the “Strong Beer Act.” They have songs about beer with lusty “nipperkin, pipperkin, and the brown beer” choruses; and in village parlours you may hear stentorian baritones, of agricultural extraction, shouting out that “Feayther likes his beer, he does;” that “Sarah’s passionately fond of her beer, she is;” and denouncing awful vengeance upon those enemies of the people who would “rob a poor man of his beer.” Our fingers were brought to the very hair-trigger of a revolution by the attempted interference of an otherwise well-meaning nobleman, with the people’s beer; and did not William Hogarth strike the right nail on the head when he drew those two terrible pictures of Beer Street and Gin Lane? The authorities of the Victoria Theatre have preserved, I am glad to say, a wholesome reverence for the provisions of the Strong Beer Act, and it is, I believe, a clause in the Magna Charta of the management, that the performances on Saturday evenings shall invariably terminate within a few minutes of midnight, in order to afford the audience due and sufficient time to pour out their final libations at the shrine of Beer, before the law compels the licensed victuallers to close.

There are not many gradations of rank among the frequenters of the Victoria Theatre. Many of the occupants of the boxes sat last night in the pit, and will sit to-morrow in the gallery, according to the fluctuation of their finances; nay, spirited denizens of the New Cut will not unfrequently, say on a Monday evening, when the week’s wages have not been irremediably dipped into, pay their half-crown like men, and occupy seats in the private box next the stage. And the same equality and fraternity are manifest when the audience pour forth at half-price to take their beer. There may be a few cheap dandies, indeed—Cornwall Road exquisites and Elephant-and-Castle bucks—who prefer to do the “grand” in the saloon attached to the theatre; there may be some dozens of couples sweethearting, who are content to consume oranges, ginger beer, and Abernethy biscuits within the walls of the house; but the great pressure is outwards, and the great gulf stream of this human ocean flows towards a gigantic “public” opposite the Victoria, and which continually drives a roaring trade.

I wish that I had a more savoury locality to take you to than the New Cut. I acknowledge frankly that I don’t like it. We have visited many queer places in London together, of which, it may be, the fashionables of the West-end have never heard; but they all had some out-of-the-way scraps of Bohemianism to recommend them. I can’t say the same for the New Cut. It isn’t picturesque, it isn’t quaint, it isn’t curious. It has not even the questionable merit of being old. It is simply Low. It is sordid, squalid, and, the truth must out, disreputable. The broad thoroughfare, which, bordered with fitting houses, would make one of the handsomest streets in London, is gorged with vile, rotten tenements, occupied by merchants who oft-times pursue the very contrary to innocent callings. Everything is second-hand, except the leviathan gin-shops, which are ghastly in their newness and richness of decoration. The broad pavement presents a mixture of Vanity Fair and Rag Fair. It is the paradise of the lowest of costermongers, and often the saturnalia of the most emerited thieves. Women appear there in their most unlovely aspect: brazen, slovenly, dishevelled, brawling, muddled with beer or fractious with gin. The howling of beaten children and kicked dogs, the yells of ballad-singers, “death and fire-hunters,” and reciters of sham murders and elopements; the bawling recitations of professional denunciators of the Queen, the Royal family, and the ministry; the monotonous _jödels_ of the itinerant hucksters; the fumes of the vilest tobacco, of stale corduroy suits, of oilskin caps, of mildewed umbrellas, of decaying vegetables, of escaping (and frequently surreptitiously tapped) gas, of deceased cats, of ancient fish, of cagmag meat, of dubious mutton pies, and of unwashed, soddened, unkempt, reckless humanity: all these make the night hideous and the heart sick. The New Cut is one of the most unpleasant samples of London that you could offer to a foreigner. Bethnal Green is ragged, squalid, woe-begone, but it is quiet and industrious. Here, there is mingled with the poverty a flaunting, idle, vagabond, beggarly-fine don’t-care-a-centishness. Burkins in hold in Pentonville for his sins assures the chaplain that the wickedness of the New Cut is due solely to the proximity of the “Wictoriar Theayter, that ‘aunt of disypashion and the wust of karackters.” For my part, I think that if there were no such safety-valve as a theatre for the inhabitants of the “Cut,” it would become a mere Devil’s Acre, a Cour des Miracles, a modern edition of the Whitefriars Alsatia; and that the Cutites would fall to plundering, quarrelling, and fighting, through sheer _ennui_. It is horrible, dreadful, we know, to have such a place; but then, consider—the population of London is fast advancing towards three millions, and the wicked people must live somewhere—under a strictly constitutional government. There is a despot, now, over the water, who would make very short work of the New Cut. He would see, at a glance, the capacities of the place; in the twinkling of a decree the rotten tenements would be doomed to destruction; houses and shops like palaces would line the thoroughfare; trees would be planted along the pavement; and the Boulevard de Lambeth would be one of the stateliest avenues in the metropolis. But Britons never will be slaves, and we must submit to thorns (known as “vested interests”) in the constitutional rose, and pay somewhat dear for our liberty as well as for our whistle.

In the cartoon accompanying this essay, you will find a delineation of the hostelry—the tavern—bah! it isn’t a hostelry—it isn’t a tavern; it is an unadulterated gin and beer palace—whither takes place the rush at half-price for malt refreshment. I have kept you lingering at the door a long time; I have digressed, parried, evaded the question; discoursed upon the transpontine drama, and the moot question of its morality; I have wandered about the New Cut, and have even gone back to the last century, and evoked the ghost of Doctor Johnson; I have been discursive, evasive, tedious very probably, but purposely so. I was bound to show you the place, but it is better that the pen should leave the fulness of representation to the pencil in this instance. It is humorous enough, brilliant enough, full of varied life and bustle enough. I could make you very merry with accounts of the mock Ethiopian serenaders at the door, with facetious remarks on the gentleman in the sou’-wester, knee-shorts, anklejacks, and gaiters, who is instructing the lady in the mob-cap in the mysteries of the celebrated dance known as the “Roberto Polveroso,” or “Dusty Bob and Black Sal.” I might be eloquent upon the subject of the sturdy sailor who is hobnobbing with the negro, the Life Guardsman treating the ladies, like a gallant fellow as he is, and the stream of honest, hardworking mechanics, their wives, and families, who have surged in from the “Vic.” to have their “drop of beer.” But the picture would still be incomplete. In graver pages—in tedious, solemn journals only—could be told (and I have told, in my time) the truth about a gin-shop in the New Cut. I will not descant upon the crime and shame, the age made hardened, the very babies weaned on gin. Let us take the better part, and throw a veil over this ugly position of the night side of London.

* * * * *

Do you ever read the supplement of the “Times” newspaper? Of course you do; at least, you must diurnally peruse one column at least of that succursal to the monster journal, specially interesting to yourself. Almost every one who can read is anxious to consult the “Times” every morning for one purpose or other. Either he requires information about a ship that is going out, or a ship that should be come home; about a purse he has lost, or a bank-note he has found; about a situation he wants, or a clerkship he has advertised for competition; about the wife he has run away from, or the son who has run away from him; about the horse he wishes to sell, or about the Newfoundland pup he wants to buy; about his debtor’s bankruptcy, or his own insolvency; about the infallible remedy for all diseases, for which he has promised to send a recipe on the receipt of twelve postage-stamps; or the best curative pills advertised for hypochondriasis and dyspepsia; about the cheapest sherries, and the best second-hand broughams; about pianofortes for the million, sales by auction, money to be lent, or money wanted to borrow; and, chiefest of all, about the “births, deaths, and marriages,” which announcements are the prime and favourite reading of the female sex. Indeed, I know one lady—young, comely, accomplished, good-natured, and married—who never even condescends to glance at a line of the colossal “Times” newspaper, beyond the “Births, Marriages, and Deaths;” and very good reading she declares them to be.

There is a portentous column to which my attention is attracted (I know not why, for it has never concerned me in the slightest degree), having reference to dancing. I don’t allude to the casinos, or masquerades, or public full-dress balls, to which a man may go, lounge about, stare at the votaries of Terpsichore, and go away again without ever shaking a leg; but to the advertisements of the professors of dancing and “drawing-room deportment,” who really mean business, and give instruction in those elegant and graceful arts, and hold their academies daily and nightly all over London, from the farthest East to the extremest West. Now I am myself no dancer. I remember as a boy, in the grim Parisian _pension_, or school boarding-house attached to the College where I had my scant Humanities hammered into me, a certain obese professor, to whom my parents and guardians paid a certain quarterly sum for my instruction in the poetry of motion. I remember him well, for whenever we took our walks abroad in Paris, we could scarcely pass a dead wall without seeing it placarded, or a _porte cochère_ without seeing it hung, with a little yellow black framed bill, screened with a wire trellis-work, proclaiming “Boizot” and his “_cours de danse_.” This was in ’39; yet last winter in Paris the same walls and _portes cochères_ still sounded the praises of Boizot. He appears to be immortal, like Cockle of the pills, Grimstone of the eye-snuff, and Elizabeth Lazenby of the sauce. The square _toqued_ and black-gowned professors of the College Bourbon—now Lycée Bonaparte—could by dint of locking me up in cellars, making me kneel across sharp rulers and rapping my knuckles with ferulas (for corporal punishment never—oh! never—enters into the scheme of French education), impel me to construe Cæsar indifferently well; but Boizot, in all his _cours de danse_, failed in teaching me the difference between _cavalier seul_ and _en avant deux_—between the _pastorale_ and the _chaine des dames_. A more incorrigible dunce at dancing than your humble servant, never, I believe, existed. In the attempt to instruct me in the enchanting and vertigo-giving waltz, Boizot made a most lamentable _fiasco_, although he resorted to his famous specific of stamping on the pupil’s toes with heavy-heeled shoes till he made the right steps to the right time. But our gyrations always ended in my doing all my waltzing on _his_ toes; and he flung me away from him at last, denouncing me as a hopeless _butor_, _ganache_, _cretin_, and _cancre_—a Vandal, a Goth, an Ostrogoth, and a Visigoth—the three first being terms perfectly comprehensible to the French schoolboy, but for which it is difficult to find equivalents in this language. I am sure that Boizot left me with the utmost dislike and contempt, and with the most sinister forebodings for my future career. Thenceforth I was released from the dancing-lessons. In after years, I have heard it reported on good authority that I once danced a hornpipe at the wedding-breakfast of a maritime relation of mine; but the exploit, if ever accomplished, was due more, I opine, to the salmon and cucumber of the nuptial feast than to the _certaminis gaudia_ of dancing. I essayed seriously once more to waltz at a Kursaal ball at a German watering-place. How I tore a lady’s dress, how I tripped myself up, how I was covered with shame, and had the finger of scorn pointed at me, are yet matters of history at Bubbelbingen Schlaggasenberg. Thither I will return no more. Again, when I visited Russia, the first letter of introduction I presented on my arrival at St. Petersburg brought me an invitation to a grand ball. It was—Oh, horror! a diplomatic ball; there were not half a dozen persons in plain clothes in the ball-room; and I stood lonely and forlorn among a crowd of brilliant guardsmen, be-starred and be-ribboned ministers, plenipotentiaries, and embroidered _attachés_, who are proverbially the best dancers in Europe. I had not even the miserable safety-valve of crossing over and talking to the non-dancing dowagers, for, according to Russian custom—one which would delight the irreverent Mr. Spurgeon—the ladies remain at one end of the _salon_, and the gentlemen at the other—a relic of Orientalism—and in strict isolation, during the intervals between the dances. I was in despair, and about either to rush out or to recite “My name is Norval,” with a view towards exciting curiosity and inspiring terror, when the gracious lady who did the honours for the ball-giving minister, who was a bachelor, asked me if I didn’t dance? I didn’t say that I had a sprained ankle, that I was hot, or tired, but I told the truth for once, and said honestly that I couldn’t. “Don’t you smoke, then?” she continued, glancing at me with a sort of pitying expression, as though she were thinking, “I wonder what this gawky Englishman _can_ do?” I replied that I could smoke a little; whereupon, with her own fair hands, she opened a door and inducted me to an apartment, where a score of Boyards and secretaries of legation were smoking Havannahs, playing _préférence_, and sipping whisky-punch, and where I stopped till two o’clock in the morning, became very popular, and positively sang a comic song. At evening parties in England, alas! they seldom have a smoking-room, and so I don’t go to them. A non-dancing man becomes speedily known in society, and the women shun him.

I can’t help thinking (of course, on the fox and sour grapes principle), whenever I see a very accomplished male dancer, as when I look upon a first-rate amateur billiard-player, on the immense amount of time the man must have wasted to acquire a useless and frivolous art. Yet I remember the fox and the grapes, and suppress my rising sneer. Dancing to those who like it, and can dance gracefully, is an innocent and cheerful recreation. It does my heart good sometimes to see the little tiny children in our crowded London courts and alleys waltzing and polkaing to the Italian organ-grinder’s music; and I shall be sorry for the day when some new Oliver Cromwell or Puritan government—we may have another in time—may denounce and put down “public dancing and dancing academies.”

But why should the dancing academy column in the “Times” advertisements possess more than general attractions for me? Is it that I have a sneaking inclination to visit one of these establishments as a pupil; take six private lessons from Miss Leonora Geary, or Mrs. Nicholas Henderson—I could never dare to face Madame Mélanie Duval, or the Semiramis of dancing mistresses, Madame Michau Adelaïde—study the fashionable steps in secret, and then burst upon the world as an adept in the _Schottische_, the _Cellarius_, and the _Deux Temps_? Alas! I do not even know the names of the fashionable dances of the day, and very probably those to which I have alluded are by this time old fashioned, out of date, rococo, and pigtaily. But I have a theory that every man must dance before he dies, and that of the choreographic art we may say as of love—

“Whoe’er thou art, thy master see,
Who is, or was, or is to be.”

And I shall dance, I suppose, some of these days, although my nerves be shrunk, my blood be cold, and hair white, and Death scrape away on the fiddle, as in Hans Holbein’s shudder-giving panorama.

Mr. William M’Connell, however, the young gentleman who is my artistic _fides achates_ in this horological undertaking, is, I am given to understand, a complete master of this desirable accomplishment, and a finished adept in its various mysteries. In this case, therefore, the leader has become the led, and I am grateful to him for his service as cicerone in introducing me to the domains of Terpsichore.

Assume, O reader and spectator—to violate no academical privacy—that we are in the _salle de danse_ conducted for so many years, and with so much success, by Mrs. Hercules Fanteague, late of the Royal Operas. Throughout each day, from morn till dewy eve, does Mrs. Fanteague—a little woman, who, at no remote period of time, has been pretty—assisted by her husband, Mr. Hercules Fanteague, a diminutive gentleman, with tight pantaloons and a “kit,” and a numerous family of sons and daughters, who all appear to have been born dancing-masters and mistresses, give private instruction to ladies and gentlemen, who are as yet novices in the art, or who are too shame-faced to venture upon the ordeal of public instruction. But, at nine o’clock in the evening, commences the public academy—the “hop,” as some persons, innocent of the bump of veneration, call it. There, in the tastefully yet cheaply decorated saloon, with its boarded floor and flying cupids and sylphides on the panels—there, where the gas shines, and the enlivening strains of a band, composed of a harp, piano, and violin, are heard—there, in a remote section of the apartment—the _pons asinorum_ of the dancing-school—the adult gentlemen, who are as yet in the accidence or rudiments of dancing, are instructed in the mysteries of the “positions” and preliminary steps by Mrs. Hercules Fanteague. The dancing-mistress is obliged to be very firm and decided, not to say severe, with her awkward pupils; for some are inclined to blush, and some to laugh and whisper disparaging jokes to one another, and some to tie their legs into knots and imitate the action of the old shutter telegraphs with their arms, and some to sink into a state of stony immobility and semi-unconsciousness, from which they can only be rescued by sharp words and pushes. When these hopeful ones are sufficiently advanced in the elements, they are handed over to lady partners, who, to the sound of the aforesaid harp, piano, and violin, twirl them about the room till they are pronounced fit to figure in the _soirées_ of society, and in the Arabian Night-like scenes of Cremorne and Highbury Barn.

I once heard a man of the world tell a lady, in gay reproach, that there were three things impossible of accomplishment to her sex. “Women can’t throw,” he said, “they can’t jump, and they can’t slide.” The lady stoutly denied the third postulate, and adduced in proof her own sliding performances in winter time in the day-room at boarding school. The first assertion she settled by throwing the peeling of an apple at him, which fell deftly over his left shoulder, and formed on the carpet, I am told, the initials of her Christian name. However this may be with other ladies—for she was fair, and good, and wise, as “Sydney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother,” though Time has not thrown a dart at her yet, I know there is one thing a man cannot do. He cannot dance. He may take lessons of Mrs. Hercules Fanteague till his hair grows out of his hat, and his nails grow out of his pumps; he may dance the Crystal Platform at Cremorne to sawdust, but he will never succeed in making himself more than a capering elephant, or an ambling hippopotamus, with the facial expression of an undertaker’s man on duty for the funeral of a very rich “party,” where extra woe is laid on by Mr. Tressels, regardless of expense.

Of course I except professional dancers, and I bow reverentially before the bust of Vestris, “_Diou de la Danse_” and of the late Mr. Baron Nathan. I do not remember the first. He died years before I was born, yet I see him in my mind’s eye on the stage of the Grand Opera in Paris, swelling with peacock-pride and conscious merit—in dancing—in full court-dress, his sword by his side, his laced and plumed _chapeau bras_ beneath his arm, his diamond _solitaire_ in his laced shirt-frill, leading his son to the footlights, on the night of the first appearance of the youth, and saying, “_Allez_, my son, the Muses will protect you, and your father beholds you.” Was it this son, or a grandson I—tell me “Notes and Queries”—that was the Armand Vestris, whom our Eliza Bartolozzi (the famous Madame Vestris) married, and who was hurried at that dreadful hole at Naples? I see the _Diou de la Danse_ on a subsequent occasion at rehearsal, when the same son, being committed to the prison as Fort l’Evêque by the lieutenant of police (the whole operatic _troupe_, led by Mademoiselle Guimard, were in a state of chronic revolt) dismissed him with these magnanimous words: “_Allez_, my beloved one. This is the proudest day of your life. Demand the apartments of my friend the King of Poland. Take my carriage. Your father pays for all!” But the poor baron, with his corkscrew ringlets, turn-down collar, and limber legs, I can and do remember. I have seen him dance that undying _pas_, blindfold, among the eggs and tea-things, in the Gothic Hall at Rosherville. But five Sundays since I was at Gravesend, and over my shilling tea in the Gothic Hall, I sighed when I thought of Baron Nathan and of happier days. “Where art thou, my Belinda? There is no one to pull off my shrimp-heads now.”

Lo, as I pen these reminiscences of nine o’clock in the evening—pen them in the “quiet street,” where I am again for a season—though my boat is on the shore, and my bark is on the sea, and ere you hear from me again there will be a considerable variation of clocks between London and Jericho—a fife and tabour announce the advent of a little dancing boy and girl, with a careworn mother, in the street below. I look from my window, and see the little painted people capering in their spangles and fleshings and short calico drawers. It is against conviction, and against my own written words, and against political economy, and ex-Lord Mayor Carden; but I think on Mr. Carrick’s picture of “Weary Life,” and must needs take some pence from the clock-case, and throw them out to these tiny mummers. Life is _so_ hard, my brother!

TEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE,” AND AN ORATORIO AT EXETER HALL.

Exists there, in the whole world, civilised or uncivilised, a nation of such inveterate grumblers as the English? We grumble at everything. We are five-and-twenty millions of bears afflicted with perpetually sore heads. Are we charged sixpence extra for a bed? is the tail of our mutton-chop underdone? does our mockturtle soup disagree with us? is a railway train late? or the requisite amount of hop deficient in our pale ale? does an Italian itinerant split our ears while we are endeavouring to solve the Seventh Problem in the First Book of Euclid? does the editor or manager refuse to return the manuscript of our poems or our farces? do we buy a silk dress that turns out to be nine-tenths cotton? are we surcharged by the commissioners of income-tax, (_they_ say I make a thousand a year, I say I don’t _make_ a hundred and fifty; but may difference of opinion never, et cetera)? forthwith we call for pen, ink, and paper, and indite a letter to the “Times,” that providential safety-valve for the great legion of grumblers. What are our public meetings but organised arenas of grumbling? what the “leaders” in our Sunday newspapers but extra facilities for grumbling after we have been grumbling all the week? I think it was Mr. Horace Mayhew, in his “Model Men and Women,” who told the story of a waiter at a city tavern, who took but one holiday in the course of the year, and then enjoyed himself by paying a visit to another waiter at another tavern, and assisting him in laying the knives and forks. In like manner the ordinarily-understood holiday for the gentlemen of the daily press—there being no diurnals published on Sunday—is Saturday; whereupon, after lying in bed somewhat longer than usual on the sixth day’s morning, they indulge in the _dulce desipere in loco_, by writing stinging leading articles in the journals which publish editions on the Sabbath. This is due to their inveterate propensity for grumbling. And, mark me, this licensed and acknowledged grumbling is the surest safeguard of our liberties, and the safest guarantee for our not drifting from our snug roadstead of constitutionalism, where we can ride at anchor, and smile at the timid argosies and caravels of despotism, moored and chained in the grim granite basins of the inner port, and all without launching into the troubled oceans, full of breakers and white squalls, of utter democracy. We seize upon a wrong, and grumble at it, till, after a few months’, and sometimes a few years’ grumbling, we find that the wrong exists no more, and that we have gained another Right. But we have had no barricades _ad interim_, no fusillades, no bombardment of private houses, no declarations of the “solidarity” of anybody, no confiscations, no deportations, and no guillotinings. Our rulers, grown wise by experience of smashed windows, pelted heads, and occasional (when the people were very hard driven) political annihilation, and hurling into the limbo of red tapism, have of late years placed few or no restrictions upon grumbling. The noble lord at the head of the Government daily receives deputations, who grumble at his measures, or at the measures he won’t guarantee to propose, fearfully. In the Parliament House, no sooner does our gracious Queen, in her silver bell-like voice, speak the speech that others have written down for her (I daresay she could write a much more sensible discourse herself), than Lords and Commons begin to grumble about the sense of her words, and move amendments to the address which is to be presented to her. Downstairs, all through the session, parliamentary committees are grumbling at witnesses, and witnesses are grumbling at the committee; and in outlying boroughs vicious electors are grumbling at the members of the Commons’ House of Parliament. The country newspapers and the London newspapers grumble. The barristers grumble at the judge, and the judge at the jury. The public grumbles at the way soldiers are treated by the officers, and the soldiers (who are about the only citizens who are not addicted to grumbling) go out and fight and win battles, at which we at home grumble, because so many lives have been lost. And I daresay the Prime Minister grumbles because he has the gout, and the Queen on her throne grumbles because “Punch” caricatures the Prince Consort, and “Punch” grumbles because the Prince Consort does not often enough give occasion to be grumbled at. I grumble at being obliged to write for your amusement, and you grumble because I am not half amusing enough. We grumble at the cold dinners at school, at the price of the marriage license, at the doctor’s bill for our first child’s measles, at the cost of the funeral of Uncle John, who left us all his money. We grumble because we have to live, and grumble when the physician tells us that we must die. Does it not all resolve itself into our purer, better Fielding’s aphorism in “Vanity Fair”—“Ah! _vanitas vanitatum_? Who of us has not his hobby, or, having it, is satisfied?” Yet there is much virtue in having at least liberty to grumble.

These thoughts come over me as I wend my way at Ten o’Clock at night along the New Road—what do they call it now? Euston Road, Pancras Road, Paddington Road—_que scais-je_—towards the suburban district of Pentonville. It won’t be suburban much longer; for Clerkenwell and Islington, Somers Town and Finsbury, are hemming it in so closely that it will be engulphed some of these days by a brick-and-mortar torrent, like the first Eddystone Lighthouse. A pleasant spot once was Pentonville, haunted by cheery memories of Sir Hugh Myddleton, the New River Head, Sadlers’ Wells Theatre, and the “Angel” at Islington—which isn’t (at least now-a-days, and I doubt if it ever was) at Islington at all. They began to spoil Pentonville when they pulled down that outrageously comic statue of George IV., at Battle Bridge. Then they built the Great Northern Railway Terminus—clincher number one; then an advertising tailor built a parody of the Crystal Palace for a shop—clincher number two (I am using a Swivellerism). The pre-ordinate clincher had been the erection of the hideously lugubrious penitentiary. However, I suppose it is all for the best. The next step will be to brick up the reservoir, and take down that mysterious tuning-fork looking erection, which no doubt has something to do with the water supply of London, and the New River Head; then they had better turn the Angel into a select vestry-room or a meeting-house for the Board of Works; and then, after that, I should advise them to demolish the “Belvidere.”

Whose connection with grumbling you shall very speedily understand. At this famous and commodious old tavern, one of the few in London that yet preserve, not only a local but a metropolitan reputation, there is held every Saturday evening—ten o’clock being about the time for the commencement of the mimic Wittenagemotte—one of those meetings for political discussion, and the “ventilation” of political questions, whose uninterfered with occurrence, not only here, but in Fleet Street, in Bride Lane, and in Leicester Square, so much did rouse the ire of the _sbirri_, and _mouchards_, and unutterable villany of Rue de Jérusalem spydom, in the employ of his Imperial Majesty, Napoleon III.

I have run the gauntlet of most of these harmless symposia of political talk; and with all, save the Westminster Forum, I can claim acquaintance. I have been one of the Alumni of “Cogers” or “Codger’s” Hall, Bride Lane, where the gentleman who occupied the chair was addressed as “My Noble Grand” by the speaker. I have attended a meeting at the Forum, held at the Green Dragon,[11] Fleet Street, where visitors are invited to join in the discussion; and where, one evening, joining in the discussion as a stranger, the meeting objected to my political views, and a vote passed the chair that I was to be thrown out of the window; from which ignominious exodus I was only rescued by the advent of a friendly Templar, who had dropped in from chambers to the Forum to oil his rusty eloquence in time for the coming Western Circuit. I have dropped in, too, occasionally, at Mr. Wyld’s Reading-Room, in Leicester Square, and have listened to much drouthy eloquence on subjects home and foreign. But nowhere have I seen such tableaux as the governmental journals of Paris have depicted, in the gloomiest of colours, as images of the political discussion meetings of _perfide Albion_. Nowhere have I seen a bowl of blood on the table, the chairman sitting on a barrel of gunpowder—to be subsequently used for the conflagration of the Thames—the orator addressing his hearers from the summit of a pile of ball-cartridges erected on a coffin; or dissentient members launching _abuses_, charged with fulminating mercury, at an unpopular speaker’s head. Dark and dangerous meetings, of dark and dangerous men, do certainly take place in London. Oppressed, despairing, starving, outlawed, outraged exiles, do meet in holes and corners, do plot and conspire, do hurl, in speech, denunciation and sarcasm, at despots. But you must not go to Fleet Street, to Bride Lane, to Leicester Square, nor, least of all, to Pentonville, to find them. The doors of those mysterious meeting-places are “tiled” as securely as Freemasons’ lodges. Now and then a traitor, by lies and hypocrisy, gains admittance, but woe to the traitor if he be discovered in his treason. He dies within the year.

The “Belvidere” is distinguished above its kindred discussion halls, by its eminently respectable aspect. The subjects broached are bold enough, and are as boldly treated; but you are puzzled to reconcile the full-blown democracy of some of the speakers, with their mild, bank-account-possessing, rate-and-tax-paying, housekeeping appearance. They bark but do not bite. The usages and prestige of the place, too, demand a certain amenity in discussion and forbearance in reply, which throws an extra tinge of respectability over the whole. Looking at this spacious, handsome room, panelled and pillared, comfortably and brilliantly lit, with its doubled rows of mahogany tables covered with bottles and glasses full of steaming compounds that do comfort the flesh outwardly and rejoice the spirit inwardly—in strict moderation, mind; looking at this burly, substantial auditory, ensconced in their cosy chairs, smoking their cigars, and listening with attentive ears to the orator; looking at the thoughtful waiter slipping from table to table, administering refreshment and receiving orders with a subtle swiftness, yet taking, I will be bound, an ardent mental interest in the discussion; looking at the grave chairman in his comfortable high-raised _fauteuil_—you might fancy this to be one of the parochial “representative councils,” as vestries are now queerly christened, or a freemasons’ lodge, when, “labour” being over, “refreshment” commences, or an ordinary club of middle-class men accustomed to meet one another, and talk upon the topics of the day over a social glass. And, in truth, were you to suppose this, you would not be so very far out in your calculation. These are, indeed, vestrymen—or representative councillors—freemasons, benefit-club, middle-class men. But the topic of the night is invested with authority, and its discussion is subject to rules; and the highest compliment I can pay to the “Belvidere” is that, if in that other Discussion Hall, held between the months of March and August, in a green-leather and oak-carving furnished chamber, nigh unto the crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, as much sobriety, decorum, and persistence in adhering to the matter in hand were shown, as in this convivial parliament, the business of the nation would progress much better, and we should have much less cause to grumble at most things.

See a speaker on his legs—a fluent speaker, somewhat of a florid speaker, occasionally somewhat of a violent speaker, though his violence is strictly confined to words and gesticulations. What withering sarcasms he hurls at kings and ministers! How eloquently he tells those tyrannical puppets that, when they are forgotten, when the force and direction of personal satire is no longer understood, and measures are felt only in their remotest consequences, his words shall still be found to contain principles worthy of being transmitted to posterity! How sneeringly he assures our rulers that they have but a copyhold interest in the state, that they cannot waste, that they cannot alienate, and that the fee-simple is in us! How menacingly he assures the monarchs of the earth that the crowns which were gained by one revolution may be lost by another! and how much, listening to his impassioned exordium, to his whirlwind argument, to his scathing peroration, I become impressed with a notion that the orator has a capital memory, and has been an assiduous student of certain letters, which were addressed, in our great-grandmothers’ time, to Mr. Woodfall, the printer of the “Public Advertiser,” by a mysterious correspondent—a correspondent whose motto was, “_Stat nominis umbra_” and who chose to assume the pseudonym of “JUNIUS.”

In these orations you are sure to hear a good deal about Catholic Emancipation, the Test and Corporation Acts, the Spa Fields Riots, the Peterloo Massacre, the “Piccadilly Butchers,” the “Dorsetshire Labourers,” Queen Caroline’s Trial, Richmond the Spy, and similar topics. They are not very amusing, perhaps, but they are of infinite service in keeping juvenile politicians _au fait_ with the political _memorabilia_ of thirty or forty years since. I have even heard an ardent reformer, with scarcely so much as a tuft on his chin, declaim in burning accents upon the great case of Horne Tooke _versus_ the House of Commons—“Once a priest forever a priest”—on Jack Wilkes, Number Forty-five, and the question of general warrants, on the cruelty of Lord Ellenborough to William Hone, the trial of Colonel Despard, and the eventualities which might have followed the successful assassination of Lord Sidmouth by Arthur Thistlewood.

A staid, middle-aged gentleman follows the reformer, and proceeds, genteelly, to demolish him. He is a staunch upholder of our ancient institutions, and sneers at the presumptuous and levelling tendencies of the age. He has some neat things to say about the “Pig and Whistle” style of oratory, at which the ardent reformer winces, chews the end of his cigar, and empties his glass indignantly; and he concludes with a glowing eulogium on church and state, our glorious constitution, and our noble aristocracy.

Ere I leave these placid tribunes of Pentonville Hill, discharging their harmless philippics at men high in place and power, I muse a little over the tavern itself, and call to mind a certain story I once heard respecting it, possessing what foundation of truth I know not, but which, if not true, is assuredly _ben trovato_. Thus runs the dubious legend: You remember the fair young daughter of England, the good princess, the virtuous daughter of a wicked father, and in whom, from her cradle to her marriage, the hope and love of this stolid but strong-feeling nation were centred. You remember her husband: he is a king at Brussels now. You remember how, when she died, all England burst into a passionate lament; how thousands went into voluntary mourning; how clergymen wept in the pulpit, when they discoursed on her virtues; how an awful darkness and despair seemed to overshadow the ill-governed land when the news came that the Princess Charlotte was dead. There is little need to say that her husband (who, I am glad to believe, loved her very truly and fondly) was at first inconsolable for her loss, and grieved long and bitterly for her. But time was good to him, and heaven merciful, and by degrees his sorrow wore away. Still he was melancholy, pre-occupied, and loved nothing so much as to be left alone. It was about this time that the then landlord of the Belvidere began to notice that about eleven o’clock almost every forenoon during the week a gentleman in deep mourning, and on horseback, would stop at the door of the tavern, leave his horse in charge of his groom, enter the large room, call for a pipe and a pint of ale, and quietly enjoy those refreshments for about the space of one hour. The room would be at that early hour of the day almost deserted. The one or two tradesmen who would occasionally drop in for a crust of bread and cheese, and a peep at the “Times,” would be bidden a civil “good morning”—in a slightly foreign accent—by the stranger; but he never entered into conversation; he never read the newspaper; he “kep hisself to hisself,” the waiter said. But he was so punctual and so regular in his attendance, that the people of the house came to look out for his daily visit in his suit of sables, and a special pipe was laid, a special dish of tobacco prepared, and a special chair and spittoon arranged, every day for his use. So things went on for many weeks; till one luckless morning, just after the departure of the black horseman, a customer of the house—I believe he was a commercial traveller, who had just returned from a journey in the west of England, and who had been enjoying his pipe and pint in the society of the taciturn stranger—called the landlord on one side.

“Do you know who that chap is?” he asked.

“Not a bit,” answered the host. “Comes here every morning regular. Pint of mild sixpenny; bird’s-eye; gives the waiter twopence, and goes away. Groom has a glass of ale sitting on his horse. Pays his way like a gentleman.”

“He’s somebody,” said the commercial traveller, significantly.

“So I should think,” returned the landlord, quietly.

“He’s a high fellow,” added the bagman, mysteriously.

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said the landlord, tranquilly.

“Why, bless your heart, man alive!” broke out, impatiently, his interlocutor, “can’t you guess who he is? He’s Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. I have seen his Royal Highness a hundred times, and know him by sight as well as I do you.”

The next forenoon, when the sable horseman arrived, he found a roll of crimson baize laid down from the pales before the tavern to the doorway, which was lined by American aloes in tubs. The staircase was freshly carpeted; in the stranger’s customary place was a table covered with a crimson cloth, backed by a crimson chair with gilt legs. The landlady, her daughter, and the barmaid, were all in holiday attire, and when the unknown rang the bell, the landlord himself, in a blue coat and brass buttons, and his hair newly powdered, brought him the beer in a silver tankard, and a wax candle at which to light his pipe. The black horseman said nothing, drank his ale, and smoked his tobacco, paid his reckoning, made his way downstairs amidst a profusion of bows and curtsies, mounted his horse, and—never came again. So runs the legend. The commercial traveller may have been wrong in his assertion, or may have been hoaxing the landlord; but I incline to the belief that this was really Prince Leopold. Why not? The incident is trifling enough; yet there is something touching in the picture of the good-natured young German brooding over his bereavement, yet consoling himself in the simple German fashion, over his pipe and beer.

* * * * *

Friend of mine, if you have the slightest hope or thought that whither I am now taking thee is one of the gay and merry scenes of London night-life, prithee dismiss the thought, for thou art in error. Prithee pull up the collar of thy coat, stiffen thy neckcloth as much as possible, take that wicked cigar from thy mouth, cast down thine eyes, and assume a decorum, if thou have it not. We are going to Exeter Hall.

Don’t be alarmed: this is not the month of May or the season for meetings in aid of missions to the Quashiboos, the Rumbatumbas, or the Oolalooloo cannibals. We are not going to hear John B. Gough lecture on temperance. We are going to hear an oratorio, conducted by Mr. Costa—an oratorio in which Mr. Sims Reeves, Mr. Weiss, Miss Dolby, and Madame Clara Novello, are to sing—and to listen to a band and chorus brought to a degree of perfection which only the genius of such a conductor could insure, or the gigantic resources of the Sacred Harmonic Society command.

There would seem to be in an oratorio something essentially germane to the English mind and character. The sounding recitative and swelling hymns, the rolling choruses and triumphant bursts of exultant music, have a strange affinity with the solemn, earnest, energetic English people, slow to move to anger or to love, but, when moved, passionately enthusiastic in their love, bloody and terrible in their great wrath. The French can no more understand oratorios than they can understand blank verse. I remember going to see Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” once in Paris. It was winter time, and the performances took place in Franconi’s great, windy, for-summer-built horse-riding circus in the Champs Elysées. The band and chorus shivered as they scraped and sang; the _prima donna’s_ nose and lips were blue, and the music paper quivered in her hand; the _contralto_ looked exquisitely uncomfortable at not having to wear a page’s dress and show her legs. As for the audience, the ladies sat muffled up in shawls and furs—it was a morning performance—and whispered among themselves; the men sucked the knobs of their canes, twirled their moustaches, stared up at the chandeliers, and murmured, _Quelle drôle de musique_! They didn’t repeat that oratorio, and I don’t wonder at it. To the French it was neither fish nor flesh, neither ecclesiastical nor secular. If the first, they might argue, give us the chanting priests, the swinging censers dispensing fragrant clouds, the red-cassocked altar boys, the twinkling tapers, the embroidered canopies, and the swelling pæans of the concealed choristers. If the last, let us have a drinking chorus, a laughing chorus, and a dagger chorus, a _prima donna_ to make her entrance on horseback, a _contralto_ in tights, a ballet in the second act, and some red fire at the end. But this is neither mass nor opera.

They think differently in England. To the seriously-inclined middle classes the oratorio supplies the place of the opera. And it behoves you to consider what a vast power in the state those serious middle-class men and women are. It is all very well for us, men and citizens of the world, yet living in a comparatively contracted circle of acquaintances as cosmopolitan as ourselves; it is all very well for us, who see “no harm” in sitting at home and reading the newspaper, while our wives go to church; who support Sunday bands, Sunday steamboats, and Sunday excursion trains, and are agitating now for the opening of museums, and galleries, and palaces on the Sabbath; who talk lightly on serious topics, and call clergymen parsons; it is all very well, I say, for us, travelled, and somewhat cynical as we may be, to pretend that the “serious” world is an amalgam of bigotry, hypocrisy, and selfishness, and to ignore the solemn religious journals that denounce hot dinner on Sundays, or a walk after it, or the perusal of a secular book on the sacred day, as intolerable sins. Yet how many thousands—how many millions—of sober, sincere, conscientious citizens are there, who are honestly persuaded of the sinfulness of many things which we consider harmless recreations! who would shrink back in horror, if they heard a tithe of the conversations that go on every night in hundreds of well-conducted London drawing-rooms! who look upon dancing as an irreligious and Babylonish pastime! whose only light reading consists of tracts, missionary chronicles, and memoirs of sainted cheesemongers, and the beatified daughters of dairymen! I declare that I never see a theatre in a country town—where, at least, two-thirds of the population consist of such as I have described—without wondering at the lunacy of the person who built it, without marvelling at the idiocy of every fresh speculator who enters on the management. We may pretend to despise the Puritan world, write books and farces against them, and quiz the “Record” or the “Wesleyan;” but it is folly to ignore the vast numerical strength of these same Puritans. They purchase such books as “Memorials of Captain Headly Vicars” by thousands; they subscribe thousands of pounds yearly in an almost insane hope of converting heathen barbarians to a better faith; they give away millions of tracts; they flood the platform and the auditory of every public meeting. It won’t do to ignore them. Cromwell’s Ironsides and Sir Harry Vane’s Fifth-Monarchy Men have made too deep a mark upon the people of England to be lightly passed over.

But the serious world, and that section who are worldly, meet on neutral ground at an Exeter Hall oratorio. The religionists see no sin in listening to sacred music; the mundane come to listen with delight to the immortal strains of Handel, of Haydn, and of Mendelssohn. “When shall their glory fade” asked Tennyson, singing of the Six Hundred at Balaclava. When shall the glory of our great oratorio writers decay? Never—I hope.

A resident at Bethlehem Hospital—he wasn’t either a doctor or a keeper, but wore, habitually, a strait-waistcoat, took shower-baths very frequently, and kept his head close shaved—once divided the world into two classes: people who were mad, and people who would be mad. I, too—but out of Bedlam, thank heaven!—have made a somewhat analogous classification. I divide the world into people who have and have not seen Ghosts. I belong myself to the first class. I am continually seeing ghosts. I shake hands in the street with friends who have been dead these ten years. A dear dead sister comes and sits by me at night when I read, and tells me, with a kiss, that I am a good boy for coming home so early. I was troubled some years ago with a man with his head off, who, in that unseemly position, and holding his head on his knees, sat continually before me. I dismissed him at last as being an unworthy hallucination, and not a genuine ghost. I meet a good many ghosts now—friendly ghosts, pleasant ghosts—but chiefly do they favour me with their company at places of public entertainment. It may be that I am a bad listener to music or theatrical dialogue, that I am absent in mind, and _distrait_; but so surely as I go to a theatre or concert, so surely do I fall a conjuring up mind-pictures, till the theatre or the hall, and its occupants, quite fade away, and I find myself in entirely different company, talking to people who are mouldering in their graves, or who are thousands of miles away.

And so the oratorio goes on, the assemblage paying a grave and decorous attention to the music, and bearing themselves far more like a congregation than an audience. They are so devotedly rapt in the magnificent performance, that I expect every moment to hear the vast mass of them join in the choruses; and when, at the first bar of the sublime “Hallelujah Chorus,” the hearers all _stand up_, the singers in the orchestra seem to me like priests. In truth, I think that to hear an oratorio, chastens and purifies the mind, and that we go away from those grand performances wiser and better men. There is a natural disinclination to return—at least, immediately—to frivolous and trivial pursuits, after listening to those solemn and ennobling strains. I know that some exist upon whom music has no effect whatsoever; but I believe that the vast majority of mankind are influenced for good or evil by the sound of music. The most heartless woman in the world whom I know, cries when she hears “Kathleen ma vourneen.” Napoleon could never listen to “_Lascio ch’io piango la cruda sorte_,” without crossing himself. How grandly does John Dryden set forth this theory in his immortal St. Cecilian Ode! with what exquisite art has he shown us Alexander moved to alternate joy, pride, shame, weeping, frenzy, as old Timotheus sweeps the lyre in varied strains!

Now, in sober broughams and in hack-cabs—driven, I hope, by regenerated cabmen, who give tickets before they are asked for them, and never charge more than thirty per cent. above the legal fare—or haply, if the night be fine, on foot, the serious audience, well cloaked and bonneted, leave the hall. For half an hour afterwards, the Exeter Hall side of the Strand, both east and west, is dotted with serious groups in search of the last omnibus, or, perchance, boldly walking home. I wonder how many of the serious ones know anything of the thoroughfare. They may traverse it at noonday, or pass down it every morning for twenty years in omnibuses on their way to the city; but do they know anything of the night aspect of that most mysterious of London thoroughfares? It is better, perhaps, that they should not.

Minute by minute they grow scarcer, and by ten minutes to eleven there are no serious groups in the Strand. They are all gone home to supper—hot ones, very probably, for the serious world is not at all unaddicted to good living—and sober. I, too, have liberty to go and sup, if I so choose; but not, alas! to bed. Still have I work to do, and for some hours.

ELEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A SCIENTIFIC CONVERSAZIONE, AND AN EVENING PARTY.